Flannery

I can just hear the automated phone call now. A child in your household named FLANNERY was absent from fifth period and she walked home all by herself, snuffling and bawling, and it was a very long, lonely, miserable walk.

I think I've read everything by Lisa Moore – I love her – so when I recently checked to see if she had anything coming out, and discovered that she had, indeed, recently released a YA novel entitled Flannery, I had to really think about that: YA is not my favourite genre (I prefer real books, thank you very much), so would this be worth my time? In the end I took a chance, and was I disappointed? Short answer: no. Longer answer: hell no. Long answer: I should never have doubted Moore's talents as a storycrafter; she is an artist in words, and while this book might be classified as YA because of the age of the protagonist and the particular situations she finds herself in, Moore certainly created a real book here. Repeatedly capturing honest human moments (forcing me to repeatedly wipe the tears from my eyes so I could continue reading), Moore didn't write a simpler novel because of her intended audience, and repeatedly, I was aware of the respect she had for this audience. This is a fine and true book about being a teenage girl; both specific to our particular moment and universal in its truths. Loved it.

Flannery Malone is the sixteen-year-old daughter of a feminist/environmentalist/artist/single mother (there is also a younger brother from a different father; neither man is even aware of these children, let alone providing support), and as the book begins, things are going pretty well for her: Flannery is starting grade twelve, her best friend Amber is in most of her classes, and her childhood friend/crush (Tyrone, who moved away but returned to the same high school, and would be totally out of Flannery's league if they hadn't been raised together) has been assigned as her partner to develop a sellable product for their Entrepreneurship class. Tyrone suggests they sell love potions (as a “gag” product, like pet rocks), and a storyline begins that made me worry, “Uh oh, is there gonna be some kind of predictable, accidental magic subplot here?” But, I should have known I could trust Lisa Moore. 'Nuff said about that. Amber is a successful competitive swimmer, and this is Flannery describing the girls in a swimming race:

They are silver arrows they are eels they are licorice they are Lycra they are muscle they are will and will not and want to be and winning, for the first few seconds they are all winning and winning and winning and they are can't and must and will never and don't.

Now, that kind of stream-of-consciousness, listy writing makes me swoon, so I will allow that sometimes this book might be appealing primarily to my own idiosyncratic tastes (but don't worry, it's not all like that). While Flannery is unsuccessfully trying to get Tyrone to participate more in their project, Amber is falling in love with her own partner for the project, Gary: a basketball-playing, band-fronting, drug-using hoodlum who quickly takes over Amber's life – causing her to skip swim practises, lie to her parents, and drop her lifelong bestie. Moore is so specific in the details of Flannery's memories of this waning friendship that it felt perfectly universal; this is what all teenage girls feel for their best friends:

If you want to forget about that summer Miranda took us to Northern Bay Sands and we stayed in the ocean until our lips were blue and our teeth chattered and afterward we had a bonfire and jumped up and down on the bed until we broke the bed frame, and we had to sleep with the bed on a tilt and we kept rolling onto the floor, that's fine with me.

Meanwhile, Flannery's mother Miranda (a perfectly wonderful character who can live a life based on progressive ideals without it feeling either flakey or preachy to the reader) doesn't always have the money to pay the heating bills, or understand the point of boundaries, or even act like the adult in the family most of the time, but when one of her kids is hurting or in danger, Miranda's love is unquestioned and fierce.

So in that moment, yeah – I understand the extent of Miranda's fear, though she tries with all her might to keep it hidden. Miranda is afraid of whether or not there will be enough nutrition in our diets, and she's afraid she's going to accidentally kill Spiky and/or Smooth and that I'll never speak to her again, and she's afraid that her art isn't any damn good at all, because she really believes in that stuff, and it means a lot to her, and she's sacrificing a lot to keep making art, but she's thinking maybe she doesn't have the right to sacrifice so much when she's a mother with two kids to feed.

So basically, Flannery is a coming of age story about a loving and loveable main character who has extraordinary challenges in her love life (if she can't convince Tyrone to do his share of the homework, how will she get him to notice her like that?), and in her social circle (is Amber staying away because she knows Flannery doesn't like Gary, or is it because Gary doesn't like Flannery?), and in her home life (it's hard to be poor and relied upon so heavily). That's what makes this a YA book, but what elevates it is the writing: there's a wonderful chapter where Flannery is remembering the day she knew she was in love with Tyrone. They were nine and at the wedding of Miranda's ex-boyfriend, and Flannery intersperses memories of all of Miranda's boyfriends (leading up to the details of the wedding itself) with a story about Tyrone water-skiing behind his stepfather's boat, and the back and forth between the mundane of the one and the menace of the other (resulting in Flannery acknowledging that until that point her mother had successfully shielded her from the existence of true evil) was simply a masterpiece of writing: this chapter could stand alone as a short story, and yet this particular device was never used again. There's another scene where Flannery is upset, and as Miranda is rocking her, she asks to hear the story of her father one more time. And as first Miranda and then Flannery add the details of the mythical one night stand, they correct each other (usually with Miranda attempting to deromanticise the whole thing), and the back and forth felt so right: yes, it would happen just like that. I loved the image of Flannery getting into bed with her little brother after a dangerous event, curling her body against his back, and then having Miranda enter later and curl herself against the both of them; an embrace and an absolution. I loved the honesty of the snarky things Flannery sometimes couldn't stop herself from saying. I loved that Lisa Moore is never afraid to embrace the Canadianness of her settings: using the proper names for buildings and streets in St. John's without attempting to map it all out for the unfamiliar; not afraid to namedrop Zellers and Tim Hortons and Measha Brueggergosman. And the book is set in our own times in a way that I often complain is absent in books: when a kid gets arrested, it's all over Instagram; boys huddle around their cell phones to evaluate someone's girlfriend's naked pics; there's blogging and texting and Facebook: why don't all authors write about these things we all see every day? Flannery is a real book in every way, and I'm so glad I got over myself and picked it up.

There's a glass case full of chrysalises. Tiny, papery-looking sacs, each carefully pinned to a wooden slat. One papery sac has a hole punched in the bottom. I watch a wing unfold. It's black and white with a strip of fluorescent pink. It unfolds in the way all unfolding things unfold: pup-tents, origami cranes, inflatable rubber dinghies, the rest of your life. Popping out, unbuckling, flinging itself into being, already knowing what it will become. Unable to stop itself and not knowing but thoughtful about each unfolding pucker and undinted, undented, smooth and trembling wing, and yes, yes. This is it.